Critical Infrastructure Security

The Critical Infrastructure Security is the primary goal for the overall homeland security mission. S3tel. helping organizations to develop a comprehensive national plan to secure critical infrastructure and recommend “the measures necessary to protect the key resources and critical infrastructure of a country”

WHY IS CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION IMPORTANT?

Attacks on critical infrastructure could significantly disrupt the functioning of government and business alike and produce cascading effects far beyond the targeted sector and physical location of the incident.Direct terrorist attacks and natural, man made, or technological hazards could produce catastrophic losses in terms of human casualties, property destruction, and economic effects, as well as profound damage to public morale and confidence. Attacks using components of the nation's critical infrastructure as weapons of mass destruction could have even more devastating physical and psychological consequences.

CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE SECTORS

CRITICAL NATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Infrastructure is categorised according to its value or “criticality” and the impact of its loss. This categorisation is done using the Government “Criticality Scale”, which assigns categories for different degrees of severity of impact.

Not everything within a national infrastructure sector is “critical”. Within the sectors there are certain “critical” elements of infrastructure, the loss or compromise of which would have a major detrimental impact on the availability or integrity of essential services, leading to severe economic or social consequences or to loss of life. These “critical” assets make up the nation's critical national infrastructure (CNI) and are referred to individually as “infrastructure assets”. Infrastructure assets may be physical (e.g. sites, installations, pieces of equipment) or logical (e.g. information networks, systems).